Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Night terrors

We had a night terror incident again last night. This is the 2nd, so far, during this round of antibiotics. I really have to note this down and ask Swe-cha's doctor for an alternative next time. The thing is, his meds now - Omnicef - is already an alternative to Augmentin which he could not tolerate (he keeps vomiting). On this note, I'd also like to comment that Augmentin does seem to be overkill for an ordinary ear infection. I wonder why Dr H prescribed it to him last time ?

In any case, I did confirm w/ Achi (she's a pediatrician) that medications do cause night terrors in people. There is a very very very small chance of this happening but it does happen. In fact, my nephew at 2.5 years old has a consistent reaction to a specific asthma medicine (w/c Achi does not remember anymore). He would always have nightmares when he takes that medication.

Kainis, no ?

Today is day 10, the last day, of his antibiotics. Hopefully, last night's is also the last of the nightmares. He kept screaming and crying and nothing could pacify him. Eventually, we turned the laptop on and brought up Netflix. Swe-cha's attention was caught by Thomas the Train and after that, it was Bob the Builder and later, Big Bird in Sesame Street. I don't know what happened after that because I cradled him in my arms and lay him down in a sleeping position and I fell asleep. The next thing I knew, it was already 6a, the show had already stopped (whichever one it was that he last watched) and Swe-cha was already sound asleep.



Monday, August 29, 2011

Tommee Tippee Insulated Cups

We've been trying to transition Swe-cha to using a straw cup for a few months now and purchased these Tommee Tippee insulated cups for him.

The cups look nice and are insulated so they'll keep liquids cold longer and they were spill proof - it was a no-brainer so we quickly purchased it for our son.

The first time Swe-cha used this, he wasn't drinking a lot of water yet so we didn't really notice anything unusual. He liked these cups well enough.

Soon, I started sending him to daycare with these instead of his old sippy cups and the daycare staff told me that he (Swe-cha) doesn't like drinking from these.

We reverted back to the old sippy cups for daycare but we'd bring water for him in these TT insulated cups whenever we go out. We noticed that he didn't like the straw but would often ask us to unscrew the cup and he would drink directly from the cup. As expected, things did get messy & wet a lot.

Tonight, when hubby assembled the TT cup he had just washed, he decided to try it out for himself. He was curious why Swe-cha would rather just bite on the straw but not drink from it, Swe-cha does seem to know how to use a straw because he has no problems drinking from our straws!

Hubby tried to drink.

Then, he called me, "Honey, will you try this ?".

I tried to drink. Nothing came out.

I sucked. And sucked. And sucked. I sucked till I felt the pressure in my eyeballs and still nothing!

Eventually, hubby and I each had a TT insulated cup in hand and we were alternating between laughing and trying to get a drink and we felt so guilty that we kept trying to give this to our child.

And then suddenly - I don't really know how or why this happened - I started getting something. I was drinking!

So I decided to check out Tommee Tippee's website. I figured, we must have been assembling it the wrong way and if we were doing it correctly, then I wanted to write to the company to complain.

1 minute and 17 seconds later, we were disassembling and assembling the cups correctly na and we are able to drink easily - not as easily as it feels drinking from a regular straw and cup (say, your soda from McD) - but there was no resistance anymore. And no more popping of my eyeballs.

*hay!*

Next time, we will try everything out for ourselves before giving it to our child. Promise!

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Hurricane Irene

  • Rice - 1 sack. check
  • Spam - 2 dozen. check
  • Cookies (5 packs), crackers (3 boxes), snack bars (200+pcs) and chips (2 cans)- check
  • Portable stove, fuel - check
  • Swe-cha's food (gerber & earth's best jars and a huge pot of homemade lotus root and red bean soup)- check
  • Someone who can cook rice in a pot (instead of a rice cooker) - check
  • Flashlights, batteries - check, check
  • Freezers & refrigerator set to HIGH.
  • Water containers filled w/ drinking water. 6 more spare gallons of drinking water plus 2 extra cases of individual water bottles.
  • Extra water containers filled w/ water in the bathrooms in case pipes burst & we don't have clean running water.
  • Laptops & spare batteries fully charged.
  • Kindle, PSP and DS fully charged.
  • Camera battery full charged.
  • Cellphones fully charged (& spare batteries too).
  • Plants, outdoor tables, pots and the George Foreman grill brought in from the balcony.
  • We might run some tape on the windows (we were reminded by MIL). We feel that this is overkill for our area... but hey, there's nothing to lose so we'll do it anyway.
  • During the day, we wash dishes as we use them - no more soaking & leaving it in the dishwasher for an evening run as we might lose power later on.
Last night, while talking about the preparations we still need to do before Hurricane Irene arrives, hubby suddenly looked worried, "If we lose power, how will we take a bath ?"

"We can use candles to light the bathroom," I replied.

"Noooo, that's not the problem. If there's no power, there's no hot water heater. How will we take a bath without hot water ?" Worried siya talaga, haha!.

"For Swe-cha, we boil water on our portable stove to heat it up & give him a bath from a pail using a tabo. For us, we rough it out. Cold showers. Summer naman eh. "

Hubby cringed. Arte. *laughs*

I guess, this is it. We're as ready as we're ever going to be. The thing is, the water, food and batteries stockpile ? That's normal in our household :) We almost always have that much on hand because I stock up when there's a sale.